Chesapeake Energy is drilling a massive well in the Haynesville shale outside Shreveport, La., Doug Lawler watched a drilling rig’s high-pressure pumps rumble as workers bored in to a massive natural-gas well, part of a new drilling campaign the Chesapeake Energy Corp. chief executive calls “Prop-a-geddon.” Named for the sand that drillers use to prop open hydraulically fractured rocks, Prop-a-geddon is an experiment to create supersize oil and gas wells that the company estimates can extract fossil fuels for roughly 75% less than typical wells, thanks to potentially greater economies of scale. This well, in the Haynesville Shale formation around Shreveport, La., went 2 miles deep and another 2 miles horizontally, and used 51 million pounds of sand, which the company believes is a world record. Typical wells in this area extend about 5,000 feet, or less than a mile. “It’s the biggest job in the […]